"Harvard Li cranked out a few million PC clones in the early nineties and loaded them all with Windows, Word, and Excel - but somehow forgot to write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in court and won a huge judgement. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesnt have a penny to his name. Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd billion or two salted away.

Hardard Li has clearly been thinking very hard about how to put money where guys like Microsoft can't get it. There are many time-honored ways: the Swiss bank account, the false-front corporation, the big real estate project in the deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in a vault somewhere. Those tricks might work with the average government, but Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more agressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frission just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellounds.

Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to buy t-shirts on the Web without giving away their credit card numbers. He needs the full-on badass kind, based on hard crypto, rooted in an offshore data haven, and he needs it bad."